A mosaic traditionally refers to a decoration art originating, as far as is known, from ancient Greece. It deals with covering surfaces, such as floors, ceilings, pottery, etc. with small pieces of differently colored objects, such as stones and pieces of glass. In digital imaging, a mosaic image refers to an image constructed from several other images, piece by piece. Usually the mosaic image is larger than the original images. The mosaic image may be made by “melting” individual images together.
A panorama refers to a wide view image of a scene. Normally only one of the two dimensions is widened: typically the horizontal view is much wider than the vertical view. Panoramic images have long been made by various different mechanical camera solutions: wide-angled objectives, mirrors, lenses and rotating cameras, for instance. The digital revolution, however, has changed the scene and today panoramic images are created mainly with image stitching applications running in personal computers. So, we may say that the panorama is a sub-type of a mosaic image, enlarged mostly in horizontal dimension.
Due to another aspect of the digital revolution—the exponential increase of digital cameras in all kinds of mobile apparatuses—more and more occasional photographers leave their camera equipment home because they are carrying a mobile phone or some other hand-held device, which includes a camera and a processor. Why not create a panoramic image in real time with that mobile phone? It would be much easier, saving work, time and the phone's memory, than to do it later at home.
When creating a panoramic image, why should the image be spread only in the horizontal direction? Why should the user not be given the opportunity to shoot as big an image as he/she wishes in both dimensions?
As more dimensions are taken into account, why should the last one not be taken into account too, thus enabling the creation of three-dimensional mosaic images.